Seeking art and chapter contributions for An Echoing Resistance: Art of the Arab Spring and Its Aftermath (working title). This volume is intended to inhabit the cusp between a visual art catalogue and a critical study of the art of dissent – as represented by gallery art, videos, photos, painting, sculpture, digital art, the Internet, cartoons, satire, caricature, and street and performance art – during and after the so-called Arab Spring that took place in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East. What may have been the most effective and/or internationally noted works of the art of political dissent, and why? Who are some of the artists and what are their stories? What art – under or above ground ─ is being made today? What is its effect on and how does it reflect current crises? Has the art of the Arab Spring followed refugees into exile? What has been the continuing role of the activist artist in supporting and encouraging dissent in the aftermath of the uprisings? What of shared aesthetics and exchanges of ideas? What of feminist claims? Use of public spaces? Diverse perspectives? What influence might the art of the Arab Spring have had globally (e.g., on the Occupy Movement in the United States) and how might it influence future protest art and alliances in the art of resistance?

A small segment of the book will be devoted to artists in the diaspora and how some reacted, expressed and continue to express their solidarity with the Arab Spring and its hopes.

Please send your abstract of 250 words in English, with accompanying images (including explanatory captions) and a 100-word biography or send artwork in JPEG format, 300 dpi or larger, with a 300- to 500-word artist statement about the work and a 100-word biography to Jennifer Heath, baksunarts@aol.com by April 15, 2017.

Jennifer Heath is an independent scholar, art curator, award-winning activist and cultural journalist and the author or editor of twelve books of fiction and non-fiction, including A House White With Sorrow: A Ballad for Afghanistan, On the Edge of Dream: The Women of Celtic Myth and Legend, The Scimitar and the Veil: Extraordinary Women of Islam, The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics, Land of the Unconquerable: The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women (co-edited with Ashraf Zahedi) and, also with Zahedi, Children of Afghanistan: The Path to Peace. Her many art exhibitions include Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource, The Veil: Visible & Invisible Spaces, Black Velvet: The Art We Love to Hate, and The Map is Not the Territory: Parallel Paths—Palestinians, Native Americans, Irish. In 2016, she conceived and chaired a city-wide project, Celebration! A History of the Visual Arts in Boulder, and recently began a blog with her colleague Wahid Omar, “[Inter] Nationals: True Stories of Immigration,” which will go live in April 2017.

A gannet glides above the cantrevs of Dyfed. Curled away from sea air by some upheaval, it twitches its wings then banks back toward salt spray.

Rhiannon watches the gannet from her bed of insipid coldness. She is alone, wasted in thought, in the strong grip of years, dragging violently toward the days of grayness. The moonstone round her neck has dulled. Her skin is faded. Her snow-white hair transparent and thin.

The White Night Mare refuses to visit her dreams. No longer will she allow the White Lady to visit her nest or mount her. She disdains the crimson apples Rhiannon offers and will not let Rhiannon nuzzle her or stroke her back and forehead and flanks. When Rhiannon tries to catch her, the mare rears and screams and canters away. The White Lady has become human and leaden. It’s been too long since she left the Otherworld orchard. Abandoned her father Heveydd for love of a mortal chieftain and birthed a mortal child.

Rhiannon thinks of Pwyll’s death, weeps at a new angle, then ponders her own end. A strange notion, for death never ventured into the orchard where she was born.

Where there is no autumn and winter,

when Heveydd sat beneath a tree

and a dandruff entered his eye.

Heveydd rubbed.

Drip. Drip.

One tear and then another.

Two saltwater beads fell on his knees.

The third was a pearl.

He caught the iridescent droplet

in his palm and blew on it.

It grew

It grew to the size of an owl’s egg.

He hooted to it.

Owl’s song, dog’s rough ditty, serpent’s tune,

anthem of hart, badger’s lyric, hare’s vibration,

whale’s chanty and madrigal of horse,

until it was padded in infinite music.

Then Heveydd tucked the pearl

into the lair of the White Night Mare and there

Rhiannon incubated, hatched and nested.

Pissed pearls and cried pearls

and the milk she sucked from the Night Mare’s teats

was the juice of pearls, too.

In the mortal world,

Rhiannon’s pearls

dissolved into water

like that of ordinary women.

Who am I now? Rhiannon wonders. Not an oyster for all my pearls. Neither new velvet nor bumpy spring. Neither am I appetite, aphrodisiac and allure. The alabaster has cracked and puckered. And Pwyll, who loved me even as I aged, is gone.

She lies on her bed, dripping. Tears soak her stretched and sagging body. She squeezes her eyes. Two pearls pop out and flick her chin.

She leaves her bed, dressed all in black. She walks toward the seacliffs of Dyfed. She leaves her herds. She leaves her son and his young wife. She walks away from the Caer of Narberth, never glancing at the mound, leaving a trail of pearls. And the loyal wrens — who had come with her from the orchard and stayed through the long years and comforted Rhiannon in her anxiety — follow, warbling above her head.

She stands on a cliff and pearls tumble down her cheeks. They ricochet on the rocks, swirl into an eddy on the beach, and are drawn by tide into the sea. “No regret,” she reminds herself, “I made my choice and lived happy with Pwyll.”

But her weeping grows fiercer, until she’s howling like an ocean storm. The waves rise to meet her wails and whirl into winds that whip her gown. The black veil slaps her face.

The stream of pearls widens into a river that cuts through the cliff. The glittering white orbs spread over reefs and vault over surf and dance with maelstroms, moving west until they catch first the ear and then the eye of Manannann mac Lir.

* * *

The sea god patrols the island of Eriu in his curach and wherever he imagines the boat to go, so it goes. He makes a mist of his breath to shroud the island from Fomorii invaders.

He hears a mournful song in the distance and wonders if dolphins or selkies have lost a loved one. Then, banging. Like hailstones on drums, beating the hard wicker of his little boat.

Manannann looks down and the curach is trapped in a tangle of pearls. He scoops a handful. He bites one. He glances around and sees no one, but in the east there’s a storm. Who but he can create such a squall?

He whistles, and his horses, who can run on foam or on land, rise out of the water, pulling a golden chariot. He jumps into the cart and clicks his tongue. Horses and god streak over the war cries of the strong-haired sea and over the tempest of green waves and over the jaws of the wondrous and bitter ocean to the coast of Dyfed.

Manannann stops short of the beach. He floats on white caps, watching. A woman stands on the cliffs. Weeping pearls. She is the source of this deluge. He rocks with the swells, spying on her through fog, and when the wind snatches the veil from her head, he reaches with his long arm and grabs the black cloth in mid-air, then swims to shore for a closer look.

“I have never seen a more wonderful woman, so endowed, inside and out,” he says, materializing beside her and handing her the sopping veil.

Rhiannon nods in thanks and moves. She savors her solitude. She could not care less who he is, where he came from or what he might want.

“Wait!” the sea god implores. Long ago, Pwyll had called on her to hold still, but she made him cool his heels, until he found the right words with which to summon her. No such courtship games will ever interest her again.

His pale skin is blue where Earth’s dappled sunlight pinches it. He is long and thin, graceful on sea and in ethers, but not on land. Manannann mac Lir leaps through damp air and dandles in front of her. She turns around and there he is. She turns again. He is there. She cannot escape.

“You are a pearl, even as you weep pearls,” he says. “You are the brightest, most beautiful creature in This world or the Other.”

“Wipe the sea water from your eyes, lad,” she snaps. “And step aside!”

“What?” He is taken aback by her impudence. “I am Manannann, king of the sea.” He glowers at her, full of the pride of rank. But he is softened by love. It has been millennia since he first saw her, glorious upon the White Night Mare, and, because he comes from the Land of Promise, he sees her that way still. She is earth and sky. He is sea and sky, and he must have her for his queen. He throws his shoulders back to exhibit his tough, scaly chest.

“Come with me to Tir Tairnigiri.” He opens his arms to welcome her, and when she steps back, annoyed, he considers sweeping her into his cloak, the cloak that can catch all the colors in the world.

“I do not answer abrupt questions from boys, even noble and handsome ones like you,” she snarls, while the wrens chatter and scold him. She wishes she had her mettlesome mare to carry her off, but her magic is finished.

“No, it’s not finished,” Manannann says, reading her thoughts. “You’ve bewitched me and that is difficult to do, for I am a god of tricks.”

“You are a bag of jokes,” she says. “Now please, please leave me alone. Let me be. I am old. I’m not flattered.” She has work to do. She must discover a future, a way to be aged and alone when her new partner, grief, has finally burned itself out.

“You are not old!” Manannann is shocked at the very idea. “You’re like me. You can never be old! How can you, who sucked the White Mare’s teat, suck up this human absurdity?”

No more able to resist his impulses than the tide can resist the moon, he pulls at her belt to bring her to him. Rhiannon balks. If he does not leave soon, she’ll explode. He has raised her temper from the place where it was buried long ago, where it rested unkindled in the serenity of her years with Pwyll, after their son returned.

And this surprising reappearance of her mare’s fire begins to interest her.

“Have you no pity?” Rhiannon replies and the pearls bubble up in her eyes again. “Go back where you came from.”

He smiles and stands his ground, although, in his white-bronze, webbed sea-shoes, he teeters a bit. Rhiannon, whose own feet are hard as hooves and solidly laid, suppresses the urge to laugh.

“I am decrepit and exhausted at having to remind you of that fact. I am human, Manannann. I gave up immortality and youth for Pwyll. Soon I will die.”

“You are wrong! You will never die. Your age is delusion. Time hangs in the mortal world like dark clouds about to rain. But in our world, time curls like a serpent biting its tail. You can’t unbind your origins. Surrender, Rhiannon!” and with that enthusiasm, he wobbles wildly and nearly topples.

“What are these pearls, if not proof of your Otherworldliness?” he asks, regaining his balance.

“They are a fluke and an evil reminder of my pain, probably sent by my angry father.”

“Nonsense! Pwyll has died and you are released to return to us. Come with me and you’ll see that the youth you think you’ve lost is not gone.” He leans closer. “With me you’ll be happier than you have ever been. Forever.”

Rhiannon sighs. She has only to look in a glass to know that the choice she made is final. “This is cruel teasing,” she says, “and you are a heartless, upstart child, o mighty king of the sea.”

She sits on a rock and cups her head in her hands. Pearls sprint from her eyes. “Go away,” she blubbers. “Go away.”

Instead of going away, he blathers on and on, pacing like a penguin, waving his reedy arms, sketching pictures on the clouds to illustrate his home: gleaming turrets and towers of high-polished shell, flocks of lapis angel fish shepherded by mermaids, mermen warriors with sharks for steeds, ivory unicorn whales, unfathomably graceful orange coral reefs, undulating forests of turquoise algae, the richness and underwater magnificence of his kingdom.

She is reminded of the orchard in the Otherworld under the mound and unsure whether his pictures of that Otherworld perfection make her nostalgic or claustrophobic. Her stomach twists when he offers his home to her and more. She is quiet. She has decided to be patient as a clod of earth, hoping he’ll wear himself out.

He cups water in his palm to make a mirror. Here is her face, young as apple blossoms. “You see,” he says, “you never changed.” She smashes his hands with her fist and the water shatters. He reaches for her.

“How dare you take such liberties with an old and widowed woman?” she shrieks. “How dare you behave like this to the Queen of Dyfed!”

“No longer, for your son is king and he has a new queen.”

“Yes,” she sighs. “I am displaced.”

He laughs. “Not in Tir Tairnigiri! If I can give you now a gift of your own choosing, will you at least come with me to see my land and sleep with me one night?”

“What I want, you cannot do,” she says, trying to think quickly of a task that might finally get rid of him.

“I can do anything,” Manannann brags.

“Then build me a circle of high, broad standing stones in honor of my husband, Pwyll. And within the circle, embed a sheaf of wheat in a lodestone, that my son’s land will thrive, always abundant. Then I will go with you.”

“Done!” he shouts. And from his waist he pulls a bag made of crane skin. He empties it and outlines a circle of silver net, starfish and spirit catchers made of clams. He roars like a breaker smashing against rock and shakes his cloak.

“There! You have your wish, Rhiannon. Come, let us go now!”

The monument to Pwyll is more eloquent than Rhiannon could ever have envisaged. She blinks at Manannann, who grins proudly. She weeps again. She makes a pail of her skirt to catch the pearls, to offer them to her husband’s memory.

She shuffles slowly toward the circle, pearls clattering in her gown. The wrens hop from one upright stone to the next, then dive toward the wheat sheaf, pluck it up and suddenly, the structure shudders and wavers, melts and turns to pond.

“You liar!” Rhiannon spins to face the sea god. “You would not know water from wood or a goat from a flounder, or corn from a kipper, or a peach from a prawn! You created an hallucination to fool me into going with you. Get out! You have no hold on me!”

“There is nothing I can’t do,” Manannann sniffs. “Let me try again. If it hadn’t been for those birds of yours…” and he takes a little bow and arrow from his crane bag and points them at Rhiannon’s wrens.

“You can’t kill them,” Rhiannon says, calmly, but she is not at all certain whether they may have become as mortal as she. Yet how have they hung about these many years?

“All right. I give you leave to try again,” Rhiannon says, truly curious now as to what and who she has become, what and who she might still be and why, indeed, her fluids are once again pearls.

“Build the stone circle as strong and real as Pwyll, do it right this time, and I will go with you to Tir Tairnigiri.”

Rhiannon collapses on her rock and wraps the black veil, starched with salt, tight around her head. She stares listlessly at the horizon, mapping the flight of the gannet. She dreams of Pwyll. She wishes death would take her, too. Take her to him.

* * *

To his surprise, Manannann is uncertain whether he can satisfy the request of this female caught between mortality and eternity. He, whose moods mimic sea changes — who has seduced many a human woman and sired many a half-human child (and saved many a human warrior with his marvelous sword, The Answerer) — has never been so determined, desirous or insecure. He is enamored and glamoured by Rhiannon. He would perform any task in exchange for the White Lady’s caresses, to win her affectionate murmurs. If it is standing stones she wants, he will find them and bring them and make a monument to that precious dead husband of hers.

There is nothing he won’t do, Manannann announces to himself. But how will he do this?

The sea king is drying out. Desiccating. He is itchy and thirsty under the Earth sky. He cannot tolerate land for long. He rushes to the ocean and flops into the water. Relief. He calls his curach, climbs in and sits, bobbing and thinking, chin on knees. She has dissolved his illusion and would surely uncover another trick. Even if he could work true stone — which he cannot, because rock is alien and too heavy for his sea body or any sea magic — there are no stones in Dyfed large enough for the megalith Rhiannon requires.

Hours pass. Rhiannon languishes, staring at the sky, ignoring him, confident that he will fail. Failure is unbearable to him. A sea mew lands on Manannann’s head and scratches it for him. He thinks and thinks and his thoughts call up four nymphs who croon:

Come with us, Manannann mac Lir, and you will obtain your mind’s design.

He spreads his cloak into wings and lifts off the little boat. Skimming billows, inhaling spume, he follows the nymphs until they come to Eriu, where they dip through Manannann’s protective shroud of mist. The nymphs lead the sea king across meadows, along winding rivers and sparkling fields of cowslip to another shore, then over another chilly sea to the Island of Tory, to the foot of a mountain.

And in the shafts of that mountain, sixty Fomorii snore upon sixty stone slabs.

Manannann is dizzy and flaking. If ever there was a trial, this is it. He has gone farther inland than he has ever been. The nymphs disappear and Manannann roosts on a rock, splashing himself with dew, thinking, thinking, devising a way to get the Fomorii and their stones back to Dyfed. No Fomor will travel unless there’s some enticement: delectable De Danann blood or the shiny slather of jewels. Manannann thinks and thinks, wrapped round with his cloak, thinking until his brain conjures three geese, who nip at his ankles and rasp:

Come with us, Manannann mac Lir, and you will obtain your mind’s design.

Manannann waddles slowly behind the geese, tottering in his white-bronze, webbed sea-shoes. Now they fly; now they tramp across grasses and fragrant heather, slipping up hillock, down dale, to the end of the Rainbow, where the geese leave him beside a cavern that plunges away, away, below the sea, in the hot bowels of the Earth. Manannann is horrified. He has visited the hollows of the Daghda, but he has never been this deep in dirt. He coughs and chokes and fights for air. His fish flesh sweats. His throat clenches around the stench of sulfur.

In the cave, in the smoky dark, with stinging eyes, Manannann passes chamber after chamber, each containing a thousand golden pots brimming with jewels. He stumbles on, terrified, until his fear of tunnels gives birth at last to two blind moles, glowing like candles, who troll with their tiny teeth at his cloak and squeak:

Come with us, Manannann mac Lir, and you will obtain your mind’s design.

Trembling and tripping, Manannann, brave king of the sea, follows the moles through gruesome galleries and caliginous corridors until they come to the Hall of Priceless Illusion, where Manannann seizes a handful of treasure and comes up empty-handed.

And this is truly a wonder, for even the master of deception has been duped. He unknots the crane-skin bag on his belt. He reaches into it, and pulls out an illusion, then piles illusion upon illusion, until he has a portable mirage.

Back again he toils, through tunnels and out of the mountain, goose-stepping back across the grasses and meadows, flying along rivers and across estuaries, back to the foot of the mountain of the Fomorii, where Manannann hangs a pot of jewels on the precipice above their door.

When they awaken, the one-eyed behemoths drool and scutter and fall over and under and into one another, reaching for the unreachable riches, foregoing their breakfasts of fresh faerie babes, just for a taste of this wealth.

From his perch in a tree, Manannann calls to the brutes and offers them the jewels, if only they’ll bring their stone beds and follow him.

He carries the fanciful gems, down hillock, up dale and across fragrant fields, while the sixty Fomorii stamp on their single legs behind him, stone slabs strapped to their hairy chests.

They reach the chilly sea, where, with a wheeze of gratitude, Manannann swims into his element, and the Fomorii follow, rowing their rocks with their arms across the waves to the shore where Rhiannon sits and broods.

Manannann soars above the giants’ heads, dangling the Priceless Illusion like turnips before mules, the prize for placing one dolmen upon two, posts and lintels balanced into arches conjunct with constellations. And within the outer circle, they place a smaller one, and within that, a third round, until all the stones are upright and secured.

Then he shakes the Priceless Illusion before the sixty behemoths and leads them back to the sea. He leads them along awhile from his curach to a sound where the water yawns deeper than the hugest Fomor is high. They paddle and kick their single legs, scudding and spattering after the fast-evaporating treasure, but without their slab barges, the Fomorii drown halfway home to Tory.

Manannann returns to his palace. He dresses in his invulnerable armor with his invincible sword, The Answerer. He carries his helmet under one arm and with the other, he drags a lodestone from the sea floor and hauls it all the long, panting way to the center of the stone circle. Laboring mightily, without the magic of his crane-skin bag, he presses The Answerer flat into the lodestone to make an indentation. He places a wheat sheaf in the cavity shaped like his sword. He pours salt from his helmet onto the wheat and thaws it with hot breath, then cools it with cold breath, until it dries to a crystal sheen.

He floats to Rhiannon and stands in front of her. “My lady,” he says softly. She looks up, pleased that he is at least respectful.

“See there,” he says, pointing. “Your circle. Go test it. Set your birds on it. It is solid. Rock that will never crumble and within it, encased in thick glass, is the wheat sheaf for abundance.”

Rhiannon rises. Cautious, not to be fooled again. But she fills her black veil with blue pebbles from the beach and pearls from her eyes. She rubs against each stone, like a horse against a scratching post. The birds fly round and round. They peck at the sheaf. They cannot move it. Rhiannon strolls through the circles, spreading white pearls and blue pebbles in a spiral. Pearls and pebbles hum, infinite music that blends earth and sky, sea and sky. She chants poems to Pwyll and blessings upon the Earth. She scratches an ogham into the lodestone.

Manannann watches with unfamiliar patience until her grief and brief mortal happiness are etched into the monument. The wrens perch on her shoulders and she speaks to them in whispers. She leaves them in the circle to wait for her and guard it.

Niamh waits at Tir na n’Og. Twenty years in the human world is half an hour in the Other. A century passes in a night of lovemaking.

Niamh’s wait is long and brief. Sure enough, the white steed materializes. The horse on which her man, Oisin, left her, its saddle girth loose and swaying. The horse nudges her arm. She embraces its neck.

She consults no one. She offers no farewells. She buckles the saddle. She swings onto it. She turns the horse back the way it came.

A doe watches as Niamh rides from the Country of the Young, lightly gripping her ringing bridle, cloudless eyes fixed straight ahead, riding up from the place where she was born when time began, the country she has left only once before, when she fetched Oisin to love her.

The doe follows Niamh past the emerald sea through blue and silver mists. Over meadows that bloom without end, along a path of crystal cobbles lined with velvet ferns and trees drooping with abundance. A willow catches Niamh’s hair and tugs as if to hold her in the safety of the Sidhe.

This is not the route Oisin took out of Tir na n’Og. In that moment, the white steed splashed through the foam and flew up and over the faerie palaces with their bright sun bowers and lime-white walls that dance on the surface of the sea. Niamh, whose heart is unhindered by time, travels gradually.

The path rises. The doe bounds along the steep slope. She stops at the frontier between the worlds, where the eternal balm of Tir na n’Og turns to earthly winter and frost bends the trees. Her eyes fill with sorrow and envy, but she will go no farther.

Niamh crosses the border and wraps her silken mantle close about her shoulders. She knows nothing of seasons. She wonders how Oisin fares in this cold world. An unsettled man. Dispassionate, until the songs glimmer from his harp. He is fleet and shy and gentle and homesick.

Dry leaves crunch on heaved, hard ground beneath the white steed’s shoes. A magpie screams and snow falls. It is easy to be invisible in this harsh gloom. Why did Oisin mac Fionn return to this vale of death and decay despite Niamh’s warning?

* * *

An old, old man sits in a monastery cell. Wind cruises through cracks in stone walls. He is blind and his joints creak when he shifts on the hard bench where he has been sitting since the people brought him here when he fell from the white steed.

His faerie garments, torc of gold, silver cloak of satin and red-gold leather armor, drape like dead skin on his emaciated body. His toes clench his oversized boots.

The old man’s clothing grows larger as his thoughts contract. He will enjoy this silence until Patrick returns with more entreaties to embrace a solitary god, a god all folk in Ireland now seem to follow, a possessive deity who broaches no companions, razes the forests and claims the sun and moon and will not feast with Fionn mac Cumhall and the men of the Fianna or honor them with riches.

Had not Patrick bade his scribes write the old man’s songs of the heroes’ deeds in this world and the Other? Does he not listen enrapt, begging like a child for more and more tales?

Why then has the monk not understood that the Fianna, free men of the wild, who refused no one in need, sought always to destroy tyrants and invaders?

“Truth was in our hearts, and strength in our arms and fulfillment in our tongues,” the old man tells Patrick.

“A god who would confine generous Fionn to suffering in a pit of fire because Fionn had never known or heard of him?” The old man is astonished. “Were your god in bonds, Fionn would fight to free him. Fionn left none in pain or danger.”

The old man drifts. Roman Patrick’s arguments cannot restrain the flood of nostalgia and regret for another world, stories that are his own, with which he will not entertain the monk. The picture of a mute, naked boy takes shape behind his eyes:

The boy played beside a stream while his mother drank. Baying and barking and shouting closed all around. His mother bolted into the bushes. The boy shinnied up a tree. From his high perch, he searched for her, afraid to find her torn to pieces by hunting dogs. But she was gone and the dogs whined and scratched the tree trunk.

A man called and coaxed. At last, the boy, sensing no harm, lowered himself branch by branch and landed in the man’s arms. He looked the boy full in the face. He stroked the fur that grew from the boy’s eyebrow along his temple, brown fur dotted with white. He wept.

The boy marvelled. This was the second man he had ever seen. But while this one was small and stocky, muscular, tan and warm, the first had been beardless, thin and blue as skimmed milk. He had visited the boy’s mother many times in the cave where they took shelter. He spoke to her in wheedling, cajoling tones. She had cringed from him until he departed in anger, leaving a menacing aura.

This man, Fionn mac Cumhall, held the boy in a solid, happy embrace. “Little Fawn, my son. You’ve come home,” he laughed. “Seven years I’ve searched for you and your mother,” he said. He stood abruptly, looked about, beat the bushes half-heartedly like one who had worn a long, tired habit to the nub. He called “Sadb! Sadb!” but there was no sign of life and Fionn mac Cumhall again hugged the bewildered boy and sighed.

Then the boy was wrestling on the ground with Bran and Sceolan, who slavered and nipped him while he pulled their red ears as if they were old friends.

Now he is merely old. This groaning age has come upon him so terribly and suddenly.

The cell door opens and the monk enters bearing a bowl of broth. Fasting and prayer and flagellation. There is no laughter, no hardiness in this new world where Patrick’s god is cramped within church walls.

The monk hands the bowl to the old man. He mutters thanks and takes it with trembling hands. His white beard drags in the gruel. Patrick of Rome picks it out and sits beside him and begins again his pious persuasions. The old, old man, who is blind and shrinking, wishes he were also deaf.

* * *

The doe grazes in a glade just at the edge of the human world. A trail of red stars still hangs where the faerie Niamh passed out of Tir na n’Og. The doe looks wishfully at the scarlet shimmer. She would also go into the human world but for dangers whose details she now only barely recalls.

Her mind’s pictures swirl around a relentless white light in the form of a long, thin man. The cold figure has always lurked there.

He captured her and she escaped and he captured her again. Round and round him she ran. With every step, she changed from hind to woman or woman to hind.

There is another man, and he, too, pursues her. He is warm and tan and sturdy and safe. Sometimes, he leaps into the doe’s memory followed by two white hounds. Sometimes, he is in the mirthful company of other men.

Secure in his dun, the doe was transformed to woman and wife. Then she had a name and she lived happily awhile. But the beardless man, who burned determined as noon, found her, tricked her, trapped her, and with the fith-fath he recast her and led her away.

Fionn mac Cumhall struck his fist against his chest. He searched glen and ravine, mountain and wood, coast and cavern, calling “Sadb! Sadb!” She could not penetrate the thin, hard light to reach him.

Blood and water on a cave floor. A human infant sliding from between the twitching thighs of a deer.

The ever-present, beardless man watched from shadow as the doe licked the baby’s temple. A patch of brown fur flecked with white sprouted where her thick, coarse tongue licked and cleaned the membrane from the little boy’s head.

The fearful yelping of hounds. The shouts of hunters. The boy scrambling up a tree. The doe rushing frantically into the hard light of the beardless man. His hazel wand whistling around her. His fith-fath made her invisible to Fionn mac Cumhall.

* * *

“Have I lived so long that Fionn and the Fianna are worm-eaten in their graves?” the old man mutters. “Where are they?”

He has traveled so far through time and found no one and nothing but a pitiful, woodless place, where once-strong men are rooted to husbandry, dwarfed in the confines of fortresses, humbled by a disdainful god. At the cooking places of the Fianna, there is desiccated silence. The great oak that marked the dun is gone. A rubble of weeds and nettle and moss-covered stones where Fionn’s great hall stood.

Roman Patrick’s tonsure gleams in the cell’s wretched light. “The limbs of the mighty Fianna are torn and scorched on the burning slabs of hell.”

The old man reaches for the patch on his temple. Age has left bare and tented skin. Never has shame been put on him till now. “If the brown leaves were gold that the wood lets fall, if the white waves were silver, Fionn would have given it all away.”

The monk sighs. “Your false deities are dead, conquered by the one true god. The paradise of which you sing is wicked and profane.”

“And the hounds?” the old man mumbles. “Will Bran and Sceolan greet me in heaven with their happy yells?”

“Animals have no souls,” Patrick replies and he leans into the old man’s face, hot breath fluttering the white beard, as if to demonstrate the devil’s heat.

What are flimsy, pale angels to the Fianna? They would overcome Patrick’s devil as he were a weak infant. The old man opens his mouth to speak, then hardens into silence. A young swordsman appears in the old man’s mind, a youth who had been mute but when he finally learned human speech it was poetry and he sang with his harp by the fires of the Fianna. Patrick rumbles on, punctuating his sermon with demands for more tales about Fionn and Fianna. But the old man is lost again in the mist that drizzled on the youth one morning long ago.

Hunt-wandering overcame him as day suddenly turned to night. He was separated from his dogs and his companions and he meandered alone and weary. He stumbled into a luminous valley, where a doe grazed placidly.

She turned to him with yearning eyes. “Follow me, fawn of my heart.”

He stared at the creature, fearful he might burst with love.

They came to a rock in the base of a hill. She lifted a leaf with her mouth and the rock opened. They entered a bright cavern, lit gold with many tallows. Tapestries covered rough walls and brocade covered soft seats. Inside, the doe became a woman.

“I am your mother from whom you were parted long ago,” she said. “You are hungry and tired. Come, Oisin, Little Fawn, sit down and rest.”

She placed food and drink before him and when he had done feasting, she gave him a harp and he sang the stories of Fionn mac Cumhall. The woman who was his mother and a doe sobbed quietly.

The old man snores, dreaming of the young man asleep on his mother’s lap, while she sang to him.

My darling, my dun buck,

my spirit and my delight.

Fairim, firim, obh, obh.

May I not hear of your wounding,

may I not see you weep.

My calf, my foal, my fair one.

For three days, the youth slept and when he woke, he said, “I must go, Mother, to the Fianna.”

She kissed his cheek three times. She touched the tip of her tongue to his salty temple. She opened the door in the rock, and under the evening sky, she changed from woman to hind.

When he found his company, it was not three days, but three years had passed.

The old man wakes with a start. “How long, Patrick, since I last walked this land in the footsteps of the Fianna?”

“Half a thousand years, but time is short. Repent and be saved. You will have eternal life.”

“Monk, I had eternal life. It was mine in the lap of my mother and mine at Tir na n’Og in the arms of Niamh. Yet I chose to return, to visit mortal seasons with Fionn and my brothers. Whether they now reside in your heaven or in your hell, there I will go with them.”

* * *

A supple, young voice resounds in the doe’s memory even as she rests secure now in the balm of Tir na n’Og. The song of her son which never fades. The song of caution he daily chanted into the forests and hills and plains after he had left her golden cavern.

If you are my mother and you a deer,

arise before the sunrise.

If you are my mother and you a deer,

beware the blade in every hunter’s hand,

beware the hounds of uproar, hounds of rage

in battle-fury before you.

* * *

Niamh’s journey continues. Her eyes dart across the dark terrain seeking clues. The beauty with which she can overpower all men illuminates the land. That beauty with which she transfixed Fionn and the Fianna on the day she claimed Oisin.

She rode the white steed dressed in queen’s raiment. Her summoning song as she entered Fionn’s camp cast a drowsy stillness over the trees, the sky, the birds, the hounds and the men.

The song ended and Fionn recovered his own voice. “Where do you come from, maiden, and what do you want from me?”

The daughter of the king of the Land of Youth announced her intention.

“Of all men,” Fionn asked, “why Oisin?”

She did not answer, but looked from the Rigfennid to his son. She had spied on Oisin as he wandered through woods and fields, remote in the rowdy fellowship of the Fianna, strong and graceful, yet skittish, eyes distant as if he were seeking something lost lifetimes ago. She had disguised herself as a fly on his chessboard. As sheen on the strings of his harp, as red stars circling his campfires. She had hidden in the dark of the moon and listened to his songs. She watched him until she was distraught with love and desire.

“Will you go with me, Oisin, to my father’s land, to Tir na n’Og?”

She sat her horse before him, so radiant he lost all resolve and forgot his love for all things but her. “I will go with you to the world’s end,” he said.

He kissed his father. Fionn ran his fingers through the fur on Oisin’s temple. I have no hope that you’ll come back to me, Little Fawn,” he said.

Oisin mounted the white steed behind Niamh and they departed against the stream of Fionn mac Cumhall’s lament.

Niamh still feels Oisin’s arms around her waist exactly as they were that day. Once again, she sings her summoning song that Oisin might reveal his whereabouts.

An endless feast, unceasing music

in the land beyond all dreams.

Come, Oisin, to wild honey

and wine that never fails.

Come to fruit and flower.

You will have horses

and hounds that outrun the wind.

A magic blade

and Niamh to love you all your days.

The memories spur her impatience. Niamh shakes the horse’s ringing bridle. “My beauty, my dancer. Quickly. Can you find the place where you left him?”

The white steed shoots like a sunbeam across the plain. Soon they stand at the mouth of a quarry, where small, feeble men gasp and grunt hauling granite and marble.

* * *

The land is dotted with tiny stick-and-mud huts. The faerie Niamh thinks how cruel and foolish Oisin was to leave her. For a time in Tir na n’Og he was content. But the Country of the Young was too tame, too pretty. Ecstasy turned to evasion. Restlessness for the mortal world. To roam and hunt and fight with the Fianna. Back and forth from faerie to human Oisin migrated his whole life long. And thinking of his wandering, Niamh feels very old. She is forever sheltered, forever fixed in maidenhood. But what if her feet were now to touch the ground? Would she dissolve into dust?

She seeks Oisin — to plead for his return or mourn his death — but she has no notion of human years, or how many have gone since Oisin went away with her. Yet staring into the quarry, she sees that in whatever time that was, free men have become enslaved, and the wilderness, once so like the balmy green of Tir na n’Og, has disappeared. In the quarry below, puny, straining men, sweating despite the winter cold, pound rocks for taskmasters.

She sits on the white steed watching until one man’s eye catches hers. She calls so none but he can hear. He raises his arm to his forehead to shield himself against her brilliance. She exhales and with her breath suspends the others in their gestures. She inhales and draws the quarryman up the sides of the black pit. He shifts from foot to foot before her, eyes downcast, quivering and terrified.

At last he stammers, “Great shining queen, are you an angel who rides the devil’s stallion?”

Who or what are devils and angels? Niamh wonders. Aloud she says simply, “Tell me.”

“A warrior fell from this horse not five days ago,” the man answers.

“How did he fall?” Her voice is so sweet it emboldens him.

“Men were trapped under a marble slab. Dying. We could not move it. The slab would not budge.

“Just then, a warrior pranced toward us. On that very horse. In foreign dress. He was tall and mighty, with sword-blue eyes and ruddy cheeks. His teeth were like pearls and his yellow curls clustered beneath his helmet like a halo. We thought he, too, must be an angel come to free us from toil and care. A messenger from heaven, come to save the souls of the men crushed beneath the rock.

“Then we saw that one eyebrow spread full across his temple in fur with the markings of a fawn, and some among us were afraid.”

Niamh smiles and nods encouragement. The man grows confident.

“The warrior leaned from the saddle, and with a huge, one-handed heave, he lifted the marble slab. But as he leaned into the stone, and as it rolled back down the pit, his saddle girth unbuckled and he slipped headlong off the horse and landed on the ground.

“In that instant, this horse vanished. It was this steed and this same saddle, too. The withered thing that rose from the ground teetering was no youthful warrior but an old, old man.”

“And then?”

“We fled. Then we knew the fur on his temple was the mark of the devil. We ran as he moaned and groped blindly at the air and fell again and again.”

“You deserted him? Alone and sightless? He who had rescued you? Men have become cowards.”

The quarryman loses the rhythm of his story. He cringes when Niamh raises the flat of her hand above his head. “Go on!” she orders.

“Great queen. Blesséd angel. Please. We turned back when we saw that the doom had been wrought for him alone. Then we lifted him up and asked him who he was.

“My lady, sure he was daft. He claimed to be son of Fionn mac Cumhall, gone half a thousand years. We took him to Patrick. It is five days. Sure by now he is dead and absolved. Since holy Patrick came to Ireland with psalms and prayers to cleanse us from sin and save us from …”

But Niamh has left the man to finish telling his tale to a wreath of red stars, while the others within the quarry, released from the spell, laugh at him as if he were talking to fireflies.

* * *

Patrick dismisses his scribes. The old, old man is dying and will no longer speak. The monk has rid the land of druids and oaks and built his seven hundred churches in every corner. For five days, he has savored Oisin’s tales of the Fianna, story after story of love and war that enchant the monk and he craves the old man’s voice. In his sleep, Patrick mutters a fith-fath and, in his dreams, his body shifts to that of a handsome roebuck. Every morning he prays for absolution and scourges himself on his god’s behalf.

What life is left to Oisin has been kept pulsing by Patrick’s demands for songs. The tales have turned to rattles in his throat. He sees his mother in her golden cavern. He hears the high blasts of hunting horns and the joyful barks of Bran and Sceolan. There is no pleasure without Fionn mac Cumhall and the Fianna.

The marble grandeurs of Roman Patrick’s persistent heaven pale beside those of the green, gentle Land of Youth. The old man feels the fragile faerie bones of lovely Niamh pressing tight against him, while century after century pass like minutes in Tir na n’Og.

And the deep dread that glazed Niamh’s cloudless eyes as she spoke her warning

If you must visit the human world,

if you must find your father,

I give you leave to go.

I give the white steed to carry you.

Swear, Oisin, swear,

promise that your feet

will never touch the ground.

He had found the hunting places of the Fianna, he had found the site of Fionn’s great dun — all destroyed by time. And he had meant to return to Tir na n’Og, but he had fallen from the white steed and helpless age had overtaken him.

Patrick follows his scribes out the cell door. He will bring holy water for last rites. For his own soul’s sake and in gratitude for the old man’s songs, the monk will assure his passage into heaven and pray each day for the soul of Oisin mac Fionn despite his protestations.

Patrick is not present when red stars sift through the cracks in the monastery wall. They twirl about the cell and embrace the wizened figure barely alive on the hard bench.

When the monk returns, the cell is empty. The old, old man is gone.

* * *

In Tir na n’Og she is free. The doe cannot recall how she got here or why Fionn mac Cumhall no longer seeks her or why the cold, beardless man no longer visits her except in memory. She is free from all but loneliness.

The fog at the frontier between the human and faerie realms is lifting. The doe’s keen ears perceive the beat of hooves. She steps quickly, lightly behind a tree. There are no hunting horns, no hounds baying.

Shadows turn to silhouettes in the gloaming. Galloping straight toward her. The faerie Niamh appears bent low on her white steed. Red stars describe a trail behind her and tangle in the horse’s mane.

Come, Oisin, to wild honey,

to wine that never fails.

Come to fruit and flower…

Niamh laughs and sings. A little fawn, antlers budding, races alongside her and together they burst across the border between the worlds.

The doe emerges cautiously from her hiding place. The fawn tilts his head and nudges her belly. She passes her strong, coarse tongue over his white-speckled temple.

Niamh veers toward the emerald sea. Still laughing, she disappears into silver froth. She will meet Oisin again. When spring is on the earth, his stag’s bell will call her up.

~

Retold from versions by Michael Cromyn, Padraic Colum, Lady Augusta Gregory, W.B. Yeats and The Carmina Gaedelica, with thanks to John Wright.

Saiyam Uinicob, mountain spa of the gods, N-O-W divested of its radioactive burden, steamed and hummed happily. We gawped gratefully at the Daybringer and a tiny brand-new star glittering beside it. The crystal boulders that girdled the mountain gleamed in sunlight. The Screech Owl returned to its Daytime nap in La Cripta, where the M.D. had been hidden.

“The big Light is Venus, which you call the Daybringer. Might that little one beside it be a nova or new planet?” Humus sloshed toward us, hauling a trail of hyacinths attached to his back pocket and pointing at the sky. I told him I could still smell the Diamond dross, the litter left from its long traverse across the island. We couldn’t begin the New Era saddled with nuclear sediment.

“Toxins are everywhere,” he sighed. “They’re in the food, the water, the bark of trees and the roots of peonies. In our hair and the fibers of insect wings. On the pads of wolves’ paws and in seeds carried by migrating birds. Few people are Ecological Malodor Detectors like you, Ms. Quintal, and even fewer try. To clean the poisons is a profound challenge and to forego the temptations of mood and materialism that allow them into our environment will take an unprecedented, equitable effort on the part of humankind.”

“An effort humankind seems unwilling to make,” Carlos added.

“Oh no, Dr. Leggett, I wouldn’t be so pessimistic. We haven’t been taught. We’re brainwashed by progress and capitalists, who persuade us to worship technotopias, who try to convince us that greed is good. We’ve been discouraged from any effort except selfish, short-sighted ones.”

“Humus,” I said, “I’ll trace the remaining death-fetor, if you’ll find a means to clean it up and help us get back on our pre-pre-Colombian feet.”

He grinned. “Delighted, Ms. Quintal. There’s so much to learn. I believe applying my theory about the powers of Eichhornia crassipes might be an excellent starting point.” At that, a mating pair of hyacinths sneaked from his pants pocket and wriggled off to find a romantic spot under the volcano in the debris left by the Magenta Diamond. Just what I had in mind, too, but Carlos and I had Work to do. There is indeed a lot to learn and I’m only a neophyte Daykeeper.

I asked Chihuahua to join us.

“Call me Jorge,” he insisted.

“Jorge, you found your Second Heart when you risked your life to bring the True Flame of the Haab from the mountain. Your True Face is reflected in these water hyacinths. I glimpsed it first in the pool at Hotel Paraíso. To begin your Right Work, I suggest you become Dr. Nightsoil’s assistant and apprentice.”

So, Humus and Jorge Lopez-Schmidt, applying the biological data stored in Humus’ mighty brain, set about cleaning Quichemala until air, water and soil squeaked and shined without a vestige of the Magenta Diamond or any of the wannabe civilization introduced by the dictator and his corporate paymasters. Everywhere Humus and Jorge went, Chaos followed, so that new life emerged, and wherever there was life, there was awe and respect and almost no profit motive. But you know how it is: those annoying little windows of regularity keep popping up just when you’ve got a good Chaos cookin’.

Humus and Jorge kept meticulous records on Seeing Instruments for the benefit of future generations. At Baktuntenango, they discovered the pure, unadulterated, unhybridized, ancient seeds that Motherfather 7Moth had saved. They propagated the land. Food for everyone, including slugs and aphids and ants and weevils, as well as monkeys and macaws. All the so-called pests. We no longer require mango elixir, but mangos are magic nonetheless. The most pleasurable fruit Nature ever invented.

With the help of the Peace Furies – formerly the Eco-Fems, minus Guadalupe and LaVon – Humus eventually returned to Denver and I’ve heard he’s been wandering the Earth ever since on his quest to get rid of its ecocidal enemies. The Land of Thorns is still Decades behind us, but 2012 is coming soon, and Humus wants you norteños to be prepared.

His is the triumph of hope over experience. Hope, Humus believes, must triumph. Yet hope is merely pink pixie dust if Right Work, applied with the vigor of the Second Heart, doesn’t accompany it.

When Humus left Quichemala, Jorge became Guardian of Un-Agriculture.

The citizens of Quichemala, flora and fauna alike, vertebrate and in-, decided through a general election that, in order for Time to be on our side, we had to live in isolation. The harmless green fog, which Humus first noticed enfolding the island, makes us invisible to the outside world. We decided it must stay. It will be a permanent parenthesis to protect us from the physical and spiritual pesticides polluting Time and Space. I have my doubts about the wisdom of living insulated on an island. We might evolve ourselves out of existence under such restricted circumstances. We might experience a kind of punctuated equilibrium and become, say, flightless, like some birds and bats of New Zealand. I’ve wondered, too, about our responsibility to the planet. Indeed, we are missing a great deal, including the horrors of September 11, 2001, and the worse disasters that followed and continue. Linear Time and the dogmatic terrors that come with it hold the Land of Thorns captive. I wish I could help, but I’ve bowed to the majority of Quichemalans who want nothing more to do with the world. We consider this a worthy and powerful experiment in survival and symbiosis. Nevertheless, we fear for you out there in the Land of Thorns and we pray for you.

Our entire island is the Monarch of its Own Skin. One of the first requirements, the first Right Work, is to esnooze all Day, esamba all Night. Mamá would be appalled. We have become, as Tío Ramón advised, “gatherers of Paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.”

The people have determined that no one will ever again threaten their empowerment. N-O-W, we are one hundred percent Agents of Chaos. Civilization, we agree, is too often usurious and oppressive, a lousy idea when it denies the possibilities of magic. Elsewhere, societies are divided into a few veryvery wealthy and many veryvery poor and the poorest of these are the plants and animals who sacrifice their habitats daily.

In Quichemala, we’ve decided never to abandon anyone’s well being, sentient or not. No, it’s not exactly Camelot. How tootoo rosy and human-centered that would be. There’s the question of food. Cannibalism isn’t out of the question, it can’t be, but because we revere every living being, cannibalism itself has to be redefined.

My oh my oh, it is complex. What’s a Motherfather to do? You might not think the placid worm is a predator – unless you’re thin and green. Or the lilting goldfinch – as he cracks the skulls of endless infant flowers.

We voted to give Don Elegante the title of El Maricón, with LaVon as First Companion. There is no happier couple in Quichemala. El Maricón will organize the post-M.D. reconstruction and administer rebuilding, reforestation, education and election. He is more skilled at these tasks than he is at the supernatural. He is peculiar, but his characteristics are not. His revolving cabinet consists of representatives from nearly every species. And, of course, the hummingbirds are always there, buzzing in Elegante’s ear and feeding off his sugary pomade.

The cabinet decreed first and foremost that everyone – no exceptions – would be in charge of environmental protection. Their next act was to consecrate Motherfather 7Moth’s launch pad as a sacred site and commons. Euphrosne Flambé walked all around the island, rolling the shed skin of the Serpent of Time, like miles and miles of pink pantyhose, then coiling it into a tall obelisk, a monument to Ramón Quintal.

Needless to tell, Don Elegante grieved wildly when he realized Motherfather 7Moth was desaparecido. He gnawed his manicure so fiercely, he nearly wore his incisor skull to the gum. LaVon consoled him, while I reminded him that Tío Ramón had disappeared before and that this Time he’d promised to return in one form or another.

El Maricón may be just a tad jealous that I’m the successor Daykeeper. But I swore I’d rise to the occasion and I am learning. I still wear pink, but it’s hot and I don’t hide behind it. It illustrates my Second Heart and the person I hope to become.

I offered the jeweled cape of X-tabai to Euphrosne, to whom it rightly belonged.

“I don’t want it, girl,” she said. “Give it to Ellie.” She was right, of course. He loves it and wears it to every cabinet meeting. And though he was never to be a Daykeeper, and can never become X-tabai, any more than Xerox could, he is honored as a he-goddess, which is almost as good and which fulfilled Euphrosne’s prophecy that he would peacefully eclipse El Repelente in public leadership.

To most people lately, I have become Motherfather 10Snake, revered and respected. But to Princess Flambé, I’ll always be “girl.”

LaVon is training ballplayers for the next Haab. That one will be a bloodless game, but it’ll be thrilling to watch, and losers will still be winners, even as winners are winners, since there will be no score keeping, no competition.

Mamá left Quichemala just before the election. “Democracee. Eets a berry jello theeng to do,” she cooed proudly. No one could convince her that democracy is, in fact, a “peenk theeng,” which must vary with any culture that chooses to adopt it.

I hated to lose her. Both my hearts hurt when she left. But she had to return. Tía Angela was running the store alone and swatting twice her share of flies. What’s more, Mamá loves her adopted country. Me, I guess I’m a retrograde refugee: a returnee.

We communicate constantly, via orioles. Birdwatchers flock to Ohio for the out-of-season migrations to Quintal Dairy Queen and Green Grocery – where they fortify themselves with flan. They attribute these migrations to global warming. You can rightly blame a lot on climate change, but entres nous, these divagations of messenger orioles are not a symptom of it.

“Kip joor feets up,” Mamá advised me when she departed. Then she hugged Carlos. “Anabela – I min, Mamápapá 10eSnake – ees truly the esentinel of her-eself,” she told him, “But joo, beeg gato, take goo’ care of mi’ija and help her to act esmart.”

Then she tweaked Gordo’s tail feathers. “Joo godda be de ogliest pájaro I ever deed saw.”

“¡Chinga tu madre!” Gordo retorted.

“I had a dream inside a dream,” Euphrosne whispered when we awoke from our seven-Day sleep.

“Me, too, and part of it was that I dreamed you were dreaming. Was yours portentous, Princess?” I asked. This Time I was anxious for her advice.

“I saw a star careen to Earth and…oh, nevermind!” she sobbed. “The revolution’s over and N-O-W it’s all just re-evolution.”

Only an evening in the company of Jack Daniel’s – fortunately one of the few beverages the Russian racketeers hadn’t exterminated from the Hotel Paraíso bar – corked Euphrosne’s tears. We talked over old Times and with every shot, we released a loud prayer – “ahhh” – but my superseer, my bruja best friend kept any predictions and paranormal oracular pontificating to herself. I wondered what kind of escape she might be plotting this Time.

She would admit, of course, though not with her usual grandiloquence, that she’d augured my fate long ago when we were merely Wednesday Weekly Weepers. “Girl, I knew all along there was more to you than met the nose. I knew you would finally live out your potential. I was sure you’d put your peculiar characteristics to work and that, sooner or later, darling, you’d overcome the putrid prom pink that was colonizing your hot pink soul.”

I pretended not to care, but secretly I was tickled pink by Euphrosne’s approval.

Nevertheless, from the Moment of the Awakening at the Haab, Euphrosne could not be persuaded to forecast even so much as the weather. I am learning to do it myself. “It’s your Right Work, honey,” she assured me. “One of the Daykeeper duties, left to you by <sob> Ramón. Hell’s bells, girl, everyone’s psychic,” she said distractedly. “Most of us are just too scared to take a good look.”

Time passed. Euphrosne Flambé toiled hard. She planted trees where there had been oil wells, clear cuts and roads. She hammered and sowed and reaped and harvested. She kept Baktuntenango spic ‘n’ span, mopped the Pyramid, swept the shards of the Corporado’s effigy and tossed them into the sea, chanting curses and cleansing prayers. She polished the statue of Motherfather 4Rabbit and fertilized the village gardens with the Sacramental Leavings of pilgrims of all species at the Sacred Launch Pad of Motherfather 7Moth. She gathered leeches and herbs and mixed remedies in the laboratory distillery. But she never sang, rarely smiled and did not preach … much. Whenever she spied the tiny, brand-new star, she stopped whatever she was doing and wept. The Diositas of Seconds, Minutes, Hours, Days, Weeks and Months dragged their asses while Euphrosne waited for a Sign. The fortuneteller’s fortune.

Then one morning, the supply of nail polish and markers she’d brought to Quichemala clanked from her backpack onto the floor. Euphrosne picked them up and remembered the keys and codes she’d dreamed way back in Santa Fe. She painted the symbols carefully on her toenails, separated each little piggy with a Johnson & Johnson SuperSoft Puff left over from my pre-parenthetical olfactory daze. She refreshed the spiral on her palm and added a star.

Then she strolled into the selva, to the yaxche tree and disappeared into its sappy maw.

Oh dear, I miss her so much. I visit the tree every Day to chat and gossip. I can translate the tree’s sounds – one creak for “yes,” two for “no” – but a conversation that Euphrosne Flambé doesn’t dominate is somehow unsatisfying.

El Repelente, aka El Jaguar, aka Professor Carlos Leggett, crawls out of bed each morning, kisses me, greets the Daybringer with a whirl of his cane – from which he’s removed the derringer –and limps into the bat cave, where he communes ecstatically with images of Natous primus. He floats into Otherworlds along the high frequency corridors of bat calls, squeals and chatters. Occasionally, messages sift in from Motherfather 7Moth and Motherfather 4Rabbit.

While Carlos breakfasts, I determine which Weeks are auspicious, which Days require caution, round and round in concentric circles. We’ve named this fresh Fifty-Two-Year Era the Sun of Lepidoptera Jaguar. It is the first period of the Long-Count Calendar that began again on the Haab. It presents 18,980 Days, during which all possible interactive combinations can occur. Plus Thirteen tintinnabulating Leap Days! And they are all dedicated to Nature.

After siesta, Carlos lurches about the island, followed by the young of animals and humans alike. He has never stopped teaching, though he’s lost all interest in his former life as an anthropologist at Brainard University. All the clocks and thus all ambition have stopped.

He is fifty-two years old, no longer an academic or a guerrilla. He has found his Second Heart and True Face, and his Right Work is no less than the pursuit of bliss and dream. He traces the songlines, organizes music and poetry, which he translates to and from various animal languages. He maps the reveries and visions brought to him by Quichemaleños of every genus. The dreams create our history, a history not shaped by politicians, but sculpted from weightless unfoldings. Eternal news. Criminal visions. Pirate reveries. In the Land of Thorns, up North, it is said that to dream is dangerous. We say that the antidote, therefore, is to dream more.

At Night, after a liberal dose or two of aguardiente, accompanied by gulping prayers, Carlos metamorphoses into El Jaguar and stalks the Altar of the Lord of the Lily Jaguar, where he sketches the Day’s dreams with his claw into the surrounding soil. This way, he makes certain the Serpent of Time continues to sleep contentedly, biting its own tail, so that “once upon a Time” can coil on and on and Chaos can saturate anywhen and everywhen, with no deadly engagement with the past or future, no linear agenda. So that the universe will always be open- ended and we will always be in the present, flourishing in the glorious ( ) of N-O-W.

El Repelente, aka El Jaguar, aka Professor Carlos Leggett, let himself be captured not only to save his compadres, but for my sake. He had returned my locket and with those acts, he created his Second Heart. Mine had yet to be born, but I’ve always been a late bloomer.

The birth of the Second Heart can occur through any combination of circumstances. The Heart’s fire ignites without warning. Carlos Leggett surrendered not only to the Star Sparkle of Chaos, with its promise of instantaneous grace, he not only gave in to Earth and all her juicy, mysterious, popping protoplasms – thus befriending himself in the bargain – but for the first Time in his life, he yielded unconditionally to the thing each human being craves to the point of terror:

Love.

The birth of the Second Heart equals the daily rebirth of the Sun, the Lifegiver. The First Heart is the soul’s Daybringer. The Second Heart is Light. Love is the spark, the kindling that bursts into flame when we learn to salvage love from desire, singularity, artifice and possession, and discover our True Faces and Right Work. When we let love widen like Time in huge concentric circles, radiating like radio waves, encompassing everything on Earth, then growing on and on into the divinity of Chaos, back to the beginning, the pink quasar, the Isle of Continuous Regeneration, the spirit of wildness.

The First Heart keeps our corporeal bodies ticking and drives the mating dance. It is a chronic, sacrificial victim, often brave but usually captive and helpless. The Second Heart promises immortality, fearlessness, freedom and the renewal of Time.

The First Heart requires bypasses, pacemakers and psychotherapy. But it is more than biological or psychological, more secretly illuminated than we are ever allowed to believe. It is within the heart of the Second Heart that the forces of Pan-demon-ium reside and wait. The Second Heart breeds by accident. Buried deep within the First, it smolders like an incandescent egg. The First Heart has an infinite capacity for infinite love, unrealized until the Second Heart’s manifestation.

War, within ourselves or with others, materialism, greed and pettiness – which begin all wars – extinguishes the embers of the heart/hearth’s nest, frightens us with glimpses of our True Faces and thus discourages us from performing our Right Work.